Final Fantasy XIII
Final Fantasy XIII is a futuristic role-playing game set in a high-tech world that was officially announced at the 2006 E3 convention. It is the flagship title of the Fabula Nova Crystallis Final Fantasy XIII collection. Although the game takes place in the same universe, it is not a prequel or sequel to any of the other instalments and is not even directly related in terms of the story. Final Fantasy XIII is developed and published by Square Enix for the PlayStation 3, and built on Crystal Tools a seventh generation multiplatform game engine built by Square Enix for its future games. It was written by Motomu Toriyama and written alongside Toshiro Tsuchida and Yoshinori Kitase. The game is scheduled for release on December 17 2009 to Japan, April 2010 to North America and March 10 2010 to the rest of the world under the genre or RPG with a CERO rating of B. Final Fantasy XIII features a battle system of which its concept is to maintain the strategic nature of command-based battles, stemmed from a desire to create battles similar to those found in Final Fantasy VII Advent Children. Although the enemies are integrated into the world environment similar to that in Final Fantasy XII, battles take place in a new battle screen separate from the main playing world by which players are transported by a short flash, instead of in the same “dimension. Not only that, Final Fantasy XIII will also incorporate the same Active Time Battle System used in its predecessors, although it will work differently as users will be able to chain large numbers of commands together in order to achieve attack bonuses. Players are only allowed to control one character at a time during battles, out of a party of up to three. Additionally, there will also be a new feature called “Paradigm Shift” (or “Optima Change” in Japan) in which players can switch party members’ roles during battle. This feature was first revealed during Gamscom 2009.
Review
Final Fantasy XIII will see a new character named Serah, a vibrant schoolgirl-esque beauty that apparently has a romantic relationship with the bandanna-wearing brawler. The trailer sees them both riding a small hover ship around a spectacular egg-shaped structure which had walls clear enough to see the dazzling fireworks show going on inside. After which they drift through the night sky while talking, showered in the glow of the lights before leaning in to give each other a gentle kiss. Serah’s face is seen definitely coloured with a certain amount of melancholy after they pull apart which might foreshadow the character’s untimely death of which seemed to be hinted at throughout the trailer. Additional features that were highlighted during the trailer include a colourful festival environment (possibly connected to the egg structure), a green field populated by lumbering stone creatures, Serah and Snow talking on a dock overlooking a sunset, the bespectacled villain Jihl tormenting Sazh with seemingly disturbing news, Vanille falling to her knees in front of Serah oh what seems to be the same dock, and Sazh frantically pointing a gun at Vanille. This assortment of cut scenes seemed to depict that Final Fantasy XIII will be rich with dialogue, with very noticeable emotional payload. Not only that, Sazh’s summon was also revealed during the trailer as a creature whose fiery skin could only be Ifrit. Sazh’s level of antagonism is substantially raised when Ifrit transforms into a ridiculous hotrod with side-mounted machine guns, possibly meaning that Sazh now has the most over-the-top Gestalt summon yet. There was also another new character with little context surrounding her appearance, only to be described as having dark brown or black hair, and a number of tattoo, sporting a “cool look”
“The voice acting was really good so far, and at this point, Square Enix hasn’t confirmed that Japanese voices will be included. Producer Yoshinori Kitase explained that the files would be fairly large and that they would like to keep the game on a single blu-ray disc to minimize the number of discs they would need for the Xbox 360 version. The game also looked fantastic at this stage, running on the PlayStation 3, and it was a shame we couldn’t see more.” (GameSpot, 2009)
